How AI rendering is supercharging performance with NVIDIA

Posted Tuesday, August 01, 2017 by
RICHARD HARRIS, Executive EditorNVIDIA has announced that it is bringing the power of artificial intelligence to rendering with the launch of NVIDIA OptiX 5.0 SDK with powerful new ray-tracing capabilities.

Running OptiX 5.0 on the NVIDIA DGX Station - the company’s recently introduced deskside AI workstation - will give designers, artists and other content-creation professionals the rendering capability of 150 standard CPU-based servers. This access to GPU-powered accelerated computing will provide extraordinary ability to iterate and innovate with speed and performance, at a fraction of the cost.

“Developers using our platform can enable millions of artists and designers to access the capabilities of a render farm right at their desk,” said Bob Pette, Vice President, Professional Visualization, NVIDIA. “By creating OptiX-based applications, they can bring the extraordinary power of AI to their customers, enhancing their creativity and dramatically improving productivity.”

OptiX 5.0’s new ray tracing capabilities will speed up the process required to visualize designs or characters, dramatically increasing a creative professional’s ability to interact with their content. It features new AI denoising capability to accelerate the removal of graininess from images, and brings GPU-accelerated motion blur for realistic animation effects.

OptiX 5.0 will be available at no cost to registered developers in November.

Rendering Appliance Powers AI Workflows

By running OptiX 5.0 on a DGX Station, content creators can significantly accelerate training, inference and rendering. A whisper-quiet system that fits under a desk, DGX Station uses the latest NVIDIA Volta-generation GPUs.

"To achieve equivalent rendering performance of a DGX Station, content creators would need access to a render farm with more than 150 servers that require some 200 kilowatts of power, compared with 1.5 kilowatts for a DGX Station. The cost for purchasing and operating that render farm would reach $4 million over three years compared with less than $75,000 for a DGX Station." - NVIDIA